diss definition

It’s always hard to answer the question, “What’s your dissertation about?”

I have one answer for non-academics and another for scholars.

My own idea of what it is has changed over the last couple of years. I now see it as a “textual studies” dissertation more than anything else. For a while I wanted to say it was a “digital humanities” dissertation, which it still is, I suppose, but that was before I realized (after reading a bunch of things) that DH isn’t exactly a “field,” and that I’d better situate what I’m doing in a field.

Matthew P. Brown comments that if "textual studies" is "understood as a concern with the transmission of the book and the manuscript as physical objects taken up by human agents and conveyed through material media, we can begin to glean its relevance to studies of communication, interpretation, subject formation, and historical change" (81).

Brown’s definition suggests a broad notion of textual studies that incorporates the history of the book, including the most recent manifestation of textual evolution—electronic text. Within English studies, both textual studies and new media concern electronic textuality, as does the additional sub-discipline known as digital humanities.

Brown, Matthew P. “Cultural Studies, Materialist Bibliography and the New England Archive: Editing an Elegy from King Philip’s War.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 81-89. Web. Academic Search Complete. 20 September 2008.

Walt Whitman Levis Commercial

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a Levi's commercial that uses the Walt Whitman poem "O, Pioneers!" as its soundtrack.

I used it in my classroom to discuss popular culture representations of literature in American media. Today I decided to gather more information about it and quickly found a number of people writing about the commercial online.

People are divided over whether there's some sort of corruption of taste happening with such a use of Uncle Walt. That sort of opinion espouses a "high culture," Arnoldian point of view.

I think Whitman may have liked the idea, self-promoter that he was.

Photography

I'm starting a new photography website here: http://elizabeth-vincelette.webs.com/

SEO 2

Because digital humanities addresses where new media and literary-historical materials meet, Elizabeth Vincelette has participated in a number of conferences across the field of English studies. Over the last two years, she has attended and presented papers at CCCC in New Orleans, LA, Computers and Writing in Athens, GA, and the Watson Conference at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. See

www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc

OTHER CONFERENCE LINKS HERE

Vincelette has also taken a course in the TEI, or Textual Encoding Intiatiative, at the DHSI (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) in Victoria, British Columbia. The DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute, is devoted to the development of digital humanities scholarship and provides courses for scholars seeking hands-on training in computing skills relevant to the humanities.

For her dissertation project, Vincelette will digitize and encode an archival collection from the late nineteenth-century. The collection contains a number of materials related to the newspaper The Independent.

Publications include an article in the online journal NeoAmericanist entitled “Press One for American English” (http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall, 2008). A forthcoming publication regarding parody, authorship, and copyright, is in the works.

The following is an abstract of “Identity and Ideology: Press One for American English”:

In the American imagination, the myth of the mainstream projects an ideal of English as the legal, official national language, a belief that conflates socio-historical attitudes about language with nationalistic ideology. A music video on YouTube, entitled “Press One for English,” debuts at a time of increasingly vocal protests about nationwide English-only laws. The video represents a piece of pop-propaganda dependent on both its lyrics and its visual icons to advance its ideological stance on language. Regarding English as an earned right identifies it as symbolic capital, a political symbol used to identify what it means to be American, as well as to control that identity. The social order expressed in the song suggests a collective ideal of an America in which today’s immigrants are expected to assimilate by learning English, just as was “always done” by immigrants in the past. The song uses entertainment as a vehicle for nationalism—and ultimately for a type of propagandist pedagogy to promote the American dream, a linguistic self-reliance that expresses national identity and becomes part of a civic story dependent on assimilation.

SEO

SEO--search engine optimization. I suppose this is on the fringes of what I study with composition and digital media, but it's a fascinating turn in the once-utopian scene of the Internet.

I'm interested in a book called Google Bombthat's selling well.

So, here's a sample of an SEO type of post that performs the type of work needed to promote oneself:

As a doctoral candidate, Elizabeth Vincelette is currently writing her dissertation on digital archiving from a digital humanities perspective. Creation of the archive, entitled Independent Women, will take place over the next two years, along with the theoretical portion of the dissertation.

For the second year in a row, Vincelette will attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (see http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive), in Victoria, BC, in order to participate in training in the TEI, the Textual Encoding Initiative. TEI is a form of XML used in digital humanities scholarship to encode textual materials.

As part of her dissertation project, Elizabeth Vincelette will encode historical manuscripts related to the newspaper The Independent. Materials include letters, poetry, manuscripts, and a collection of autographs. The materials originated in a scrapbook, which appears to have been kept by a woman in the 1880s. The correspondence in the collection dates from 1880-1881, so it is likely that the materials were placed in the scrapbook near that time; evidence for that time frame is found in the collection itself in a letter.

Vincelette will select materials from the entire collection in order to create a digital archive pertaining to the women authors in the collection. Her focus will be on women’s authorship in nineteenth-century American periodicals.

Elizabeth Vincelette has two publications to date, including “Press One for American English” (available online at http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in the Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall 2008), which is not yet available online. She has a forthcoming publication on copyright and parody on YouTube.

For the last two years, Vincelette has attended a number of conferences, including CCCC in New Orleans, Computers and Writing (see www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc ) in Athens, GA, and the Watson conference in Louisville, KY (see louisville.edu/conference/watson/2008%20Watson%20Conference%20Program.pdf). Upcoming conferences include CCCC in San Francisco, CA, and Women in the Archives in Providence, RI (see http://www.wwp.brown.edu/about/activities/wwp20/schedule.html). Her research interests include American literature and digital humanities.

Her blog, Tech Tonics, is at http://techtonicsblog.blogspot.com/.

Job Market

Emerging digital humanities scholarship concerns the relationship between database and genre. The Fall, 2007, issue of PMLA contains a forum on the topic. In her forthcoming dissertation, Elizabeth Vincelette will consider the generic aspects of literary digital archives and their implications for literary and historical studies in the humanities.

As part of the dissertation project, she will work with archival materials, focusing on a collection of letters and manuscripts relating to a run of The Independent, a nineteenth century Congregationalist newspaper that had its heyday in the Antebellum era. The paper focused on social and religious issues. Most materials in the archival collection are limited to the years 1880-1881.

In particular, Vincelette is interested in the writings by women in the collection. Materials include poems, short stories, and a number of letters exchanged between the authors and the editor of the newspaper.

In 2008, Vincelette received a scholarship to attend the DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The Institute (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) is located in Victoria, BC, and is housed at the University of Victoria. In 2009, she will attend again to take a second course in TEI, or the Textual Encoding Intiative.

The following is an excerpt from a synopsis of Vincelette’s dissertation project:

My study is about a type of website that doesn’t have a standard or agreed-upon name, but that is recognizable as a form. When grouped together, these websites can be considered as an emerging genre—literary databases with the purpose of collecting and recovering women’s writings from archives, or from obscurity. The writings collected at what I’ll call “digital recovery archives” belong to textual history, to literature and other textual forms filed in boxes in archives, spooled on microform reels, or perhaps moldering in someone’s attic—letters, diaries, scrapbooks, recipes, signatures, art. Creating a name and inscribing a working definition of the digital recovery genre would help understanding of how digital humanities might change the canon. How do we, or do we, inscribe limits on what we consider intrinsically worth knowing? While recovery archives do not fit an established literary category, they share characteristics and can be generalized. Considering genre means considering limits, a paradox when a digital archive is by nature potentially limitless. Yet a creator who singles out any subject sets limits—choosing women who were well known in their time and unknown in ours; women who never intended or expected their private writings to be exposed and published; or women who are now canonical, but were unknown in their times.
Scholars can control what exists online as “representative women,” but also can invite the expansion of their numbers, enlarging our understanding of women writers and how knowing them changes how literary history is known. In a brief overview of several case studies, as well as my own (ongoing) experience constructing a digital recovery archive, I will attempt to inscribe characteristic of this emerging genre.

To read more, visit Elizabeth Vincelette’s blog, Tech Tonics, at http://techtonicsblog.blogspot.com/